


Entr'acte

by theLiterator



Series: Nikolai (Male!Natasha) verse [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Angst, Friends With Benefits, Gen, Genderswap, Small Towns, Vignette, always-a-boy!Natasha, always-a-girl!Tony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-15
Updated: 2013-02-15
Packaged: 2017-11-29 08:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/684854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nikolai drifts, finds temporary harbor, and then is asked politely to stop running, please.</p><p>The second fic in my male!Natasha/female!Tony verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entr'acte

Nikolai has disappeared many times in his life, melted into shadows and made good his escape, and this time is no different.

He runs through identities and cities like they’re all worthless, and he remembers none of it, remembers nothing but screaming terror that he had given into whether he likes it or not, and he remembers a flash of brilliant eyes over a brilliant face and the way Iron Man fell down down down like the only law Tony Stark respects is gravity, though he knows that isn’t true.

They buried Tony Stark in the sand and she built herself wings.

He stops at a motel in a tiny town and looks around.

He’s got one debit card left to his name, and it’s a SHIELD identity, so if he stops here, they’ll stop looking for him.

The air tastes bitter and dry out here, and there is a smudge of dark-on-dark far to the west that might be mountains, and he thinks this might be as good a place as any to go to ground.

There’s an ATM just sitting in an alcove across the street, and he’s always liked the sort of place where people trusted each other enough that the ATM wasn’t under sixteen different types of surveillance, so he wanders over there, pulls up a balance inquiry.

“Welcome, Nicholas!” the machine reads, and then it prints out a receipt on paper that’s just as yellow-dry as the rest of the town, and the balance listed makes him suck in his breath. If he had a phone, he’d dial Tony, just to inform her that he is a grown man, that he can take care of himself, but as it is, he doesn’t, and he needs the money for a motel room anyway, so he crumples the receipt and shoves it in his pocket and walks into the motel lobby.

The proprietor is a middle-aged woman, blonde, roughly 5’6”, with dark brown eyes and a worn-out smile. Nikolai notices all of these details as background noise, and files them away, along with the locations of the two output vents and the massive, painted over intake behind the counter.

She uses an old-fashioned imprinter to take his debit card information, and hands him a physical key to a room he can have for the month if he likes, and then she makes him take three muffins from the basket on the counter.

“You look hungry, son,” she says kindly, and he doesn’t know how to politely refuse, so he balances them in one hand and holds the key in his other and considers the half-second advantage having to drop the muffins to reach for a weapon will give his pursuers for a moment before remembering that his pursuers, this time, are all friendlies, more or less.

“You can use the computer over there in the lobby, if you need it. And I’ve got a password for the wifi for your room, if you have a notebook,” the woman calls after him. He lifts the hand holding the muffins in acknowledgement, and one topples off the stack, but he flicks his wrist just in time to catch it, and she whistles low, impressed.

He smiles, even though his back is turned to her and she can’t see it.

***

The town is quiet and full of men who offer him make-work and women who offer him food, all of whom tell him, over and over, that he looks hungry. It would be enough to drive a man mad, but he’d made the decision to stay here, and stay here he shall.

Besides, ranch work is entirely physical, and cattle don’t frighten him, so he’s _useful_. Even if they made the first offers out of pity, they let him stay on because he’s strong and sure-handed.

Cattle ranching is more work than he’d ever thought it could be, even in this modern age.

He’s sitting in the diner, three weeks after he’d arrived, when the news catches his attention. He’s always paying attention to the news, to little things and big, from celebrities dying to North Korea sending would-be ICBMs towards the West Coast, but never with his full attention. This though.

“… stunning red carpet debut of Tony Stark’s mystery man. She’s been seen in his company near-constantly since the battle of Manhattan Island, and speculation has run rampant over whether he’s a body-guard, perhaps an unarmored iron man, face revealed to us at last, or a new boyfriend. Tony is well known for her rather extravagant exploits, including a notorious video that was released to the press in 2006 showing Tony in flagrante delicto with 13 other people at a group sex event in San Francisco. Could it be that the woman who used to pride herself on her, in her words, hard-won title of slut of the year, has decided to settle down? And if so, who is her hunky squeeze? No matter what though, I can assure you that I would _definitely_ take a lick of that lollipop. Maggie, back to you.”

“I hate gossip news,” the waitress tells him, and the look on her face is partially amused, partially concerned, and he let the rest of the room filter back to the forefront of his consciousness. Two sheriff’s department officers have entered the room, but neither has so much as glanced at him, so he dismisses them and looks at his waitress.

Lily is his second favorite person in this town; following closely behind Mrs. Leeth, the motel owner. He smiles at her, and has to hold it back from being his threatening smile, keep the threat behind his lips and the charm in his eyes for her, because if Tony Stark is dating Bruce Banner it’s not the waitress’s fault.

“Celebrity crush?” she asks as she pours more coffee into his cup and nudges a plate full of eggs and bacon and homefries his way.

“I-- actually I used to work for her,” he says, and surprising himself by telling the truth. Well, to a point: Nicholas Rushman was Tony Stark’s personal assistant for several weeks before he got fired, and in this town, he’s Nicholas Rushman.

“Aww, sweetie,” Lily says. “So it was an in-person crush then? Those are worse than celebrity crushes.”

Nikolai purses his lips briefly. “I don’t do crushes,” he says.

Lily smiles at him, and it’s enigmatic, not something he’s been trained to interpret, so he smiles back reflexively and doesn’t flinch away because this is a small town half way between Colorado and Kansas and no one’s waiting for him in the dark here.

“Of course you don’t,” she says after a moment, and that tone is one he knows well, one of patronizing surety in one’s own superiority, and, well, there’s a reason he likes Mrs. Leeth better, isn’t there?

The diner is familiar and easy, and Nikolai's bank account had gotten a new deposit that morning, and he’d considered calling Tony and telling her to stop, but he’d decided it didn’t matter and come to the diner before he was due out at the ranch instead. The money is nice to have, and he knows she won't see it as a chain binding him close to her even as she wears Bruce like a particularly dangerous piece of jewelry to every event in New York and even some overseas, she'll not even see it as charity. She'll simply think that people need extravagant amounts of money to survive, so why shouldn't she help her friends out?

But still, he stabs angrily at his pancakes and doesn't keep the monster he was trained to be subdued behind his eyes like he ought to, so that even Lily stays away after that initial conversation except to fill his coffee without making eye-contact, and finally, unfulfilled, he stands up from the counter and looks around the room as he stretches: three families-- six children all told, including the infant sleeping soundly in its carrier. Two teenaged boys who aren't going to tip Lily properly, and wear their hair too long and resentment on their faces like they have something to prove. The two men from the sheriff's department who always side-eye him when he looks their way are both looking askance at him now, and Mrs. Leeth is at the counter, paying for a meal in three bags, a plate of her muffins being carefully secreted behind the counter.

It’s time for him to go to work.

***

Nikolai shouldn’t have come out to the single bar the town boasted, but when he’d finished up on the ranch he’d been working that day, the other hands had invited him along, and he found himself reluctant to refuse them. They were all so very kind to him, guileless in their acceptance of his presence, which ran contrary to every rumor, every _experience_ he’d ever had of small town denizens.

Theirs was not the only group in the place; indeed it seemed that most of the population of the town was out tonight, and a few strangers (more strange than he, now, but less dangerous, he supposes,) to boot. He accepts the bottled beer he gets handed, Coors Light, barely worth drinking , and quirks his lips at the man who’d bought the round.

There’s a lot of elbowing and hugging and rambling about the day’s work, the women at the bar, their wives and girlfriends at home, and Nikolai soaks it all up.

Eventually his group disperses around the room, joining new groups or trying to pick up women, and he stays put, sitting at the bar and watching the room with the ease of long practice. It’s amusing enough just to watch the body language of the people around him, to listen to the bartender as he bitches about the one group that keeps ordering Vegas bombs by the dozen; lining them up like dominos, breaking the occasional shot glass and making the whole crowd whoop and laugh.

After an hour and another Coors Light (and three Vegas bombs when the group had miscounted. They stick in his throat, sticky and oddly sweet, until he rinses them away with Coors Light that barely tasted like anything at all.) a group of truckers, grimy and nursing glasses of jim and coke, who were having a heated conversation with the news, which was on silent above the bar, were seated next to him. Another image of Tony and Bruce pops up before being minimized to one corner while a perfectly made up woman with dark hair and eyes presumably comments on it. Nikolai knocks back the last of his Coors before leaning forward to get the bartender’s attention.

“Don’t suppose you have anything resembling good aquavit?” he asks, taking care in his pronunciation of the word. It’s the little things that trip up good agents; pronouncing calques with the proper accent is a very common mistake among his ilk.

The bartender winks at him and pushes a shot of something amber-clear and promising his way. Nikolai looks between it and the bartender before knocking it back.

It tastes Danish, which is better than he’d hoped for, so he gets out his debit card and waves it. “Start a tab,” he says, while the tv flashes images of Iron Man side by side with images of Bruce in a suit.

“Fuck,” he says, and two more shots appear in front of him.

“Lily said you had a case of the unrequiteds,” the bartender says. “Drink up. I’ll get you home tonight.” Nikolai nods at him.

“Thanks,” he says softly. The bartender grins.

“Will,” the bartender adds, offering his hand. Nikolai takes it, and the bartender offers him a smile that holds a promise, so Nikolai replies with his very favorite smile, the one with a seduction quirked in at the edges. After a moment of shared grins, Will turns back to a customer, so Nikolai goes back to people watching.

“I say Iron Man is a menace to society and that Tony Stark is a dirty lying whore who isn't worth the spunk those Muslims left between her thighs, and I don’t care how much you’d like to lick it out for her, I ain’t gonna shut up about it and let her be!” a truck drivers snaps, leaning in towards one of the others and scowling.

Nikolai stands up, his head a little light, but not nearly enough liquor has been processed yet to slow his reaction times.

“Say that again,” he growls, and the truck driver turns to face him with almost comic slowness.

“What? No one _actually_ likes Tony. She’s like an older Lindsay Lohan, only less cute and more of a cunt.”

Nikolai moves in, and he feels like he’s wading through glue, slow and telegraphing each move before he makes it, but then his elbow collides with the man’s throat and he follows him down, pummeling his face with three quick punches and rolling up to face the rest of them once he’s reasonably assured the man is down for the count.

All four of them rush him, and he neatly sidesteps their efforts, tangling his hands in one man’s hair and using the man’s momentum to swing him back into two more of them. The fourth one recovers and manages to knock Nikolai into the floor, but Nikolai rolls into a crouch and comes out of it with a knife in each hand and the predator’s grin smeared across his lips.

They snarl and try for him again, and he slashes one of them across the forearm before all of the sudden, someone’s whistling shrilly and the Sheriff and his deputy are in between him and the truckers.

“I’m going to need you to put down the knife, son,” the sheriff is saying and Nikolai forces himself to relax his grip on the weapon, to relinquish it to the sheriff, who leans forward and quietly murmurs “Don’t tell those assholes, but you’ll get it back, I promise. These guys cause trouble every time they come through here.”

***

There’s only one cell in the local jail, which isn’t the most unpleasant jail he’s been in, though the company could be better.

“What the hell is up with that?” the initial truck driver complains around the ice pack the deputy had provided for his broken nose. “You don’t just pull a knife on a man because he’s expressing his honest opinion!”

Nikolai bites back his desire to pull one of the several knives the sheriff hadn’t noticed in the scant pat down he’d received and show the trucker exactly what he’d intended to do with said knife. Interestingly, the man with the deep cut across his forearm is unwilling to comment on the matter.

Nikolai uses his phone call to contact the SHIELD line for agents both on duty and off who’d gotten entangled with the local LEOs and was reassured that someone would be out for him within 10 hours, which was faster than he’d expected given the remote location.

When he’s let back into the cell, he curls up on his side and narrows his eyes to slits and settles in to wait.

***

At first he thinks he’s dreaming the sound of her sure strides down the hall from the front desk, not even 3 hours later, but then she’s there, standing on the other side of the bars, alive and in person and unaccompanied by Bruce.

She looks over her sunglasses at him and smirks and he’s struck by the desire to bang his head on the bars. Or maybe to run the pad of his thumb over and over her lips until they’re smiling properly and she’s safe and happy and… he has to cut off that line of thought before it can grow momentum. Happiness is not for him; _Tony_ is not for him-- Bruce was wrapped around her finger (and the rest of her, certainly,) and that was for the best. They’re both of them scientists, and he isn’t smart enough to keep her attention for long (and she has _such_ a short attention span.)

“Niko, what the hell are we supposed to do with you? Arrested in a bar fight in Bumfuck, Kansas, of all places?”

“We’re in Colorado,” he replies, trying to organize his thoughts.

She flicks her hands in an elegant dismissal, accompanying the gesture with a decidedly inelegant snort. “Couldn’t prove it by me.”

"I called the SHIELD bond agent," he says dully.

"I know,” she replies with a maddening grin. “I pulled rank.”

"Stop treating me like some sort of charity case! I didn't need your money yesterday, and I don't need it for bail today!" He draws himself to his feet in a move that would have intimidated nearly anyone else. Even Coulson, who’d weathered his emotions for nearly a decade, would have backed off when he got like this, bars or no bars.

Instead, Tony just stands there in her designer business suit with its wrinkled skirt, and repeats his accusations with a confused expression. "My... money? Charity? What?"

"You deposited 2500 dollars in my savings account yesterday!" He refuses to fall for her naïve act. He’d held her hair back for her when she was too drunk to recognize a toilet. Innocence is not a mask she can wear in front of him.

"Yesterday.... was payday? Yeah, that sounds right, what, 30 dollars an hour or so, minus taxes, right? Or did I give you any raises?"

"What?"

"Payday? Doesn't SHIELD pay you too? If not, I know a good lawyer. I brought two with me today! Just in case. Sometimes, if you only have one, he gets held in contempt and then you need a new one, so. Two."

Nikolai ignores the lawyer thing for the time being, deciding to focus his incredulity on one thing at a time. "You _fired_ me! I betrayed your trust!"

"Oh, I was dying. You can't take anything I said seriously. Besides, it worked out, right? It's not like you took out a contract on me or something. You just used sex appeal and a flawless cover to get close to me to save my life. That's... not really a violation of trust at all, now is it?"

Nikolai rubs his neck. He had not had a childhood at all, in the strictest sense, but even he knows how warped that worldview was.

She leers. "The cover was flawless in _many_ ways. You should model more. I could have a photographer here in a couple hours, probably. Maybe fewer. Are there photographers in Kansas?"

"We're still in Colorado,” he says, trying to hide his exasperation. She was just so… Tony.

"Ooh! The tone! He's back! Fantastic, great, super. Let's get going. Lawyers!”

Two lawyers appear at her summons, followed by the sheriff, who uses an actual key to unlock the cell.

“You’re letting him go?” the trucker with the gash on his arm demands angrily. “I want to press charges.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” the sheriff says, sparing a glance at Tony before unlocking the cell.

The one with the busted face chimes in, dropping his ice pack. "I was wrong. She's not the whore-- you are."

Tony whirls with expert technique and slams the heel of her hand into his solar plexus. He goes down without a sound, face turning red, mouth working to speak or scream. Nikolai smiles at her, slow and impressed. She doesn’t turn toward him to see it, and he lets it fade like a summer snow.

“Y-you can’t just _do_ that!” the trucker with the gash insists, though he doesn’t move to help his friend.

“He was trying to look up my skirt,” Tony replies coldly. “Nasty business. Self-defense, right Sheriff?”

The sheriff mumbles an agreement, and Tony tucks her hand under Nikolai’s arm.

"Chop chop, Nikolya, I'm not paying you the big bucks to sit around in jail all day. We've got... stuff... you're the P.A., you figure it out.”

Once they were out of earshot of the cell, the sheriff lays a hand on Nikolai’s shoulder. “Nick, son, you don’t have to go with her if you don’t want to. There’s plenty of work out here for a strong young man like yourself, and I wasn’t going to file the charges anyway.”

The lawyers politely avert their eyes, and Tony shifts their arms so she’s tucked in close against his side. She’s taller than him in her heels, but then, a lot of people are, and he glances up to see her smiling one of her fonder, more genuine smiles at the sheriff.

“Niko, honeysuckle, you know I’m not gonna make you do anything you don’t want, but haven’t you been running away from us long enough?” she asks, and he—

He is ashamed to admit that he knocks her on her ass and literally runs out of the station.

***

Clint is waiting for him in his motel room, laying spread out on the bed, and Nikolai settles gingerly at the edge of the mattress next to him.

After a minute or so of silence, Clint says, casually, “Coulson owes me a hundred bucks.” It’s a tacit reminder that Clint knows Nikolai better than anyone else, so he might as well spill, since Clint probably has half of it figured out anyway.

“What’s sex like?” he asks.

“You’ve had sex,” Clint replies, rolling up onto an elbow so he can peer into Nikolai’s face. “What the hell, Kolya? I’ve _watched_ you have sex.”

“Not, not like that. Not a _seduction_ , or whatever it is we do for information. No, I mean… The other kind.”

“You mean..... bondage? A little tie and tease? Some light spanking?"

Nikolai splutters a little. Clint had been the one to ask, and now he’s…

Clint rolls over completely, tackling Nikolai to the bed and staring intently into his eyes. The focused attention should be unsettling, but it’s _Clint_ , whom he knows as intimately as death, so he doesn’t allow himself to tense.

"Look, it's scary, yes, when you have emotions tied up in it, but it's so much better that way. I know-- I know better than anyone what you were, and you're the best friend I've had.... not despite that, not really, because without it, you aren't my Kolya, but... you know; you're my best friend and you're above all of that. So maybe it's time to have sex with someone you feel affection for, and, well.... If you want, _we_ could try. But only if _you_ want, got it?"

Nikolai leans up to brush a darting kiss across Clint’s lips, like an experiment. Clint tastes like salty sweat and Nikolai licks his lips as he pulls away, trying to chase the flavor. “I… I don’t know. I’m…” confused, and lost, and utterly terrified of so very many things.

But Clint knows about the parts of him that are a little boy crying (screaming) in the dark, so he doesn’t need to say it aloud.

Clint just collapses bodily over the top of him, burying him in a very heavy hug. Nikolai turns his face into the curve of Clint’s shoulder and lets himself think about being a part of a team.

He doesn’t let himself think about Bruce at all.

**Author's Note:**

> You guys, I really didn't mean for it to happen this way, but I'm pretty sure that Niko is going to sleep with everyone _but_ Tony for the next couple of fics, if I write them. I promise, in my head, it's all Tony/Natasha all the time, but with all the delightful possibilities for _angst_ , guys, I'm sure you get it!
> 
> [Also, yes, both Tony and I know that Nikolya isn't a "true" diminutive of Nikolai; one of my best friends in the world is called Nicolaj, we've had _conversations_ about proper nicknames (if I must, he says Kaj is the best.) But Tony is kind of weird about nicknames, so there it is.]


End file.
